Perfect little poem by Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor was a professor in the Lit Department at American University in D.C. when I was a student there in the late Eighties. He was my independent study adviser my senior year. I don't think he was much impressed with me, but was always very kind about it. I love this poem and think of it all the time, partly because it is brief enough for me to remember it, but more because he gets everything right in it (even down to the colon at the end of line 2). I think I recognized this even when I was young, but now, no longer young, I experience the poem in a way I wouldn't have then. It's from his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Flying Change. Here's how he inscribed my copy after an appearance before a great class I took my sophomore year with Robert Bausch called The Living Writers: 

For Jim,
With thanks for good questions and kind words --
All best,
Henry Taylor
25 March 88

The poem: 

Airing Linen

Wash and dry,

sort and fold:

you and I

are growing old.